New Feature: Tip of the Day Box for TWiki Home Page

Motivation

Many applications show a tip of the day when you launch the app. This allows the user to get more familiar with the application over time.

Description

A survey conducted at my workplace showed that users could be more productive if they learn more how to use and navigate around in TWiki. The result is this tip of the day application, which the company I work for donates to the community.

I recently created a plugin that helped out with just this issue. My plugin is called RandomCommentPlugin (which is perhaps not the best name), but it works much like
a standard %INCLUDE% except that it expects that the pattern given will isolate a portion of the page consisting only of comments in the form:

and it chooses one of the comments at random for inclusion in the page.

For my purposes, I have a TWikiTips page that has a bunch of tips on a page (in the prescribed format), along with a %COMMENT% tag allowing other users to add their own comments, thus expanding the tips that can be given.

Upon further consideration, it seems clear that this can be improved by allowing the user to specify a pattern for identifying the lines that should be considered for inclusion, but I think you get the idea. It works quite well for my needs, and I'll probably contribute the plugin, if it seems like something people would be interested in.

Of course, this could be used for other things, such as random quotes, etc.

Also, I just noticed that a plugin already exists called RandomQuotePlugin, which seems to behave in a similar way to the plugin I am suggesting. Perhaps this could be used for this purpose (I'd be willing to make any necessary modifications, if there are any).

An idea for future development: have which set of tips are displayed web-dependent. This way administrators and power users could get one set of tips and regular users another. Or to use twiki.org as an example the support web could display FAQ tips most relevant to support issues while codev would show tips about how to use the API (or whatever). Or perhaps this is already done and that's part of the docs to come... P)